Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?
Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Any FOSS Linux/Unix shell, bash, zsh, fish, tcsh, whatever, is a million times better than cmd or the early versions of PowerShell. Yeah, I know, PowerShell Core exists now, and it’s even open source and cross platform, but it still sucks.
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 days ago
And by extension, terminal emulators. Pretty much any open source one is miles better than the closed source ones.
Microsoft recognized this and has dramatically improved theirs as Microsoft terminal, an open source replacement. But it still isn’t as good as a lot of other terminals.
dgdft@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For anyone who missed it, the Windows Terminal team is infamous for claiming that it would require PhD level expertise to implement some basic optimizations suggested in a Github thread. Within a few hours, another developer countered that claim by submitting a functioning PR with said improvements implemented.
Team lead Dustin Howett then went on to double down on the original claim that said optimizations were unfeasable, and publicly attacked the author of the original suggestion thread on Hacker News. He issued an extremely half-assed apology and is still a Micro$haft employee to this day.
blog.royalsloth.eu/…/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-th…
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Heh, recently I was looking up things about terminal graphics and came upon: github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/8389
And DHowett’s reply was pretty dismissive. Guess that was the tip of the iceberg.
But this anecdote is a good ‘corp’ versus ‘open source’ anecdote. There’s simply no way a business with project management would even think about optimizing performance of a terminal emulator that seems to vaguely work according to the marketing requirements. What a waste of time, right? My experience with a software development organization is 99% of management work is to rationalize away doing anything.
Meanwhile, open source someone says “screw it, this is crap, I can fix it”.